The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  When his stretcher was carried solemnly into the Anglo-Persian hospital at Abadan, the chief doctor shook his head.

  ‘It’s no use, these people,’ he complained in a high, whining voice to his Indian assistant. ‘They will insist on bringing me patients in this condition, then seem to be surprised when they die. I mean, look at the fellow. And that tube down his throat’s been taken from some kind of motor-vehicle. It really won’t do, won’t do at all.’

  Alan was conscious at this point and heard every word. His lips were too broken now to move at all, but if they had been able to, they’d have echoed the thought in his brain. ‘Christ have mercy on me.’

  78

  Tom lay with his back against a sun-warmed boundary wall, watching cottontails and jack rabbits squabble; ground squirrels loping along; trapdoor spiders digging tunnels into the sand. But most of all he watched the scene where, a hundred and fifty feet away, the Shell Oil derrick reared up against the skyline.

  On the rig, the drilling crew were lifting the pipe section by section. Tom counted the sections as they came out.

  ‘We’re getting closer, Pips,’ he said.

  Pippa – or Pipsqueak, as Tom immediately renamed her – was turning out to be a lovable little rogue. She’d watched her previous owner walk away down the beach, richer to the tune of fifteen of Tom’s dollars, then simply turned to Tom, gave him a lick and voted him in as her brand-new full-time unpaid dog-slave. She trotted round with him by day, snuggled close to him at night, and stole food from his hand in the serene conviction that there was no such thing as theft between dog and master.

  Pipsqueak yawned, then scrabbled to get into Tom’s pocket, where she could smell warm bacon. He pushed her away. Another section of pipe rose from the well.

  ‘Any time now.’

  The derrick was about a hundred yards from the truckstop at the top of the hill. Today was the day that Shell Oil was taking its core, and half the local community had bets on whether or not the core would show signs of oil. A couple of heavies stood at the base of the rig, ready to keep prying eyes away, with fists if necessary.

  The next section of pipe came up. Pipsqueak had given up trying to get at the warm bacon, and had fallen asleep with her nose pressed blissfully up against the magic pocket. By Tom’s reckoning, there was just one more section before the corer itself. He shook Pipsqueak awake. ‘Rise and shine, sweetheart.’

  The little white mongrel yawned and wagged her stump of a tail.

  The last section of pipe rose from the hole. Up at the truckstop, a big car was parked, its nose already pointing down the hill. A man in a dark business suit leaned against the fender and watched the scene. He was the man from the Shell laboratories, there to take the sample off for analysis.

  ‘OK, Squeaker, get ready.’

  The black ants on the drilling rig had their corer now. They bent over it, taking superstitious care to bring the sample out whole. They sniffed at it, of course, but that meant nothing. If it was as full of oil as a sponge in your petrol tank, they’d have sniffed it. If it was as empty of oil as a bucket full of nothing, they’d have sniffed it just the same. Oilmen always sniff their cores.

  Tom nudged Pipsqueak to make her stand. He stood up himself and strolled closer. A dusty trail connected the rig to the truckstop. Tom walked to within forty yards of it, then stopped. He bent down and put his hand on Pipsqueak’s collar.

  The riggers on the drilling platform wrapped the core in a canvas bag, then lowered it carefully to the ground. The two heavies now enjoyed their moment of glory. They heaved the bag up – it was a big core, two feet long and eight inches in diameter – and began to carry it between them up the path. Given the level of interest in the well, Tom guessed that the two heavies would escort the sample all the way to the laboratory and a Shell Oil safe inside.

  ‘OK, Pips, don’t you let me down now.’

  Pipsqueak began to feel the tension acutely. Her mouth was open and panting, and every now and then she punctuated her pants with a long-drawn-out whine of excitement.

  ‘Nearly, Pips, nearly.’

  The two heavies were ten yards up the path. Twenty yards.

  ‘OK, Squeaky, OK.’

  Thirty yards up the path. In a moment’s time they’d be as close to Tom as the path would bring them. Tom’s mouth was drier than sand, drier than dust. One of the two heavies dropped his end of the bag and readjusted his grip. They started up again. They were forty yards up the path, halfway to their precious truckstop.

  ‘Go, Squeaker, go.’

  Tom released his grip on Pipsqueak’s collar. The little dog raced away. She was a stumpy little thing with a big dose of terrier in her exceptionally well-mixed ancestry, but Tom could see that there was something faster too: a whippet maybe, or possibly one of the larger poodles.

  She ran over the stony grass: a white blur. The two heavies saw her coming and grinned. People always grinned when they saw her. It was one of the nice things about having her.

  Within a few seconds, Pipsqueak had caught up with the heavies. She hurled herself at the canvas bag and sniffed it as though trying to inhale the entire sample. The heavies became instantly suspicious, and began to drive her away.

  Too late.

  Pipsqueak was in heaven. She dodged the boots and fists, threw her head up to the brilliant sky, and barked and barked and barked. Tom’s cracked lips broke into a brilliant smile. ‘You treasure,’ he said, ‘you little gem.’

  He let out a come-to-me whistle, and Pipsqueak tore joyously back to him through the dust. When she arrived, Tom’s hands were full of bacon and all of it was for her.

  79

  The cholera germ isn’t eternal. If it doesn’t kill you quickly, it doesn’t kill you at all.

  For one week, Alan hesitated between life and death. Fluid ran through him like one of the Hampshire chalk streams of his youth. But the cholera bug had missed its chance. The outflow of liquid began to slow down. Alan began to be able to drink normally. He sat up in bed. He was terribly thin, and his face was hollow and dark. His pale blond hair was pricklish with sweat and dirt, until one of the nurses came to wash it for him. He was weak but on the mend.

  When the doctor made his rounds that evening, he asked Alan how he was.

  ‘Perfectly well, I believe, Doctor. I owe you my deepest thanks.’

  ‘Yes, I believe you probably do. The native chappies who brought you in dished out some pretty rough treatment in that truck of theirs. Shouldn’t wonder if they’d forgotten you were in the back.’

  Alan disliked the little doctor. He was the worst sort of small-minded colonial prig, who understood foreigners all the less for living among them.

  ‘Ahmed and the others did their damnedest to get me here in one piece. If it hadn’t been for them, I’d be as dead as a tent-peg.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The doctor produced a thermometer and thrust it at Alan, who obediently popped it under his tongue. With his patient prevented from speech, the doctor began on a litany of complaint: the poor food, the difficult climate, the unreliable servants, the absence of ‘entertainments for the educated mind’. Alan wondered what the doctor had been expecting when he’d signed up for Abadan. The ballet?

  The doctor pulled the thermometer out. ‘ … nothing more to life than cricket. Hello! Temperature’s up. Only half a degree, but …’

  The doctor began to feel Alan’s chest, and examined his pulse, eyes and tongue. ‘Any feelings of fever? Chills?’

  ‘A little chilled, perhaps. Part of convalescence, no doubt.’

  You’ve been taking your quinine, of course?’

  ‘Quinine?’

  ‘Of course. Abadan is a mudflat lying at the head of an extremely warm marsh. The place is a devil’s kitchen for malaria.’

  Alan was silent for a moment. ‘There’s no malaria in the mountains and no mosquitoes,’ he said. ‘I’ve never needed quinine.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the doctor, as he solemnly shook down the thermometer.
r />   The doctor’s ‘Ah!’ was right on the mark. That night Alan’s temperature rose to a hundred and one degrees. The following morning it hit a hundred and four. Alan had a headache that split his temples. He slipped in and out of a feverish sleep. For the first time since he had demobilised, Alan began to dream about the war. Or rather, since dreams only come to people with a reasonable grip on reality, the war returned to seize Alan. Tom was there in a million forms. Tom alive but dying. Tom pleading for help. Tom in captivity. Tom wounded. Tom in no man’s land. Tom caught on the wire. Tom falling under fire. Alan kept trying to find his twin and bring him home but, every time, the nightmare intervened, to leave the two men just as separate as before.

  After two nights and a day, the high fever came down, the delirium subsided, the headache weakened. Alan thought he’d conquered the disease in double-quick time, but the doctor was prompt to disillusion him. ‘It’s the way it works. Two days on, three days off. The intervals between attacks are no picnic, but the attacks themselves are sheer bloody murder.’

  And so it was. There’d be two or three days of reprieve when Alan felt lousy, but at least he felt sane and lousy. Then his fever would rise, the crashing headache would return and the delirium came to smash all sense of reality. During these periods, Alan tossed and moaned in his bed, crying out in his sleep. And all the time, the delirium had only one theme, war, and one character, Tom.

  Alan didn’t mind the illness. He knew malaria was unlikely to kill him and physical suffering no longer meant much to him. But the dreams obsessed him. Alan had spent four years grieving Tom’s death. Four years coming to terms with it. He’d made progress. He’d learned how to find joy, love, and hope. He never forgot Tom, but was no longer disabled by his loss. Until now. It was as though the dreams had stormed in to remind him that he would never get over it. And so Alan lay beneath a cloud of fever, sweating, groaning, and thinking constantly of his lost brother.

  During his intermissions, he wrote to Reynolds telling him that he was going to be just fine. He wrote home to his parents, telling them that he was a little sick and had been advised to rest for a few weeks by way of precaution.

  He wrote to Lottie, telling her the truth, telling her about his dreams and hallucinations, telling her about the drilling back in the mountains. Each time he finished a letter to Lottie, he reread it, signed it, then put it aside. He would burn them all later. But it wasn’t the same as it had once been. Did he mean anything special to her? He didn’t know. In Piccadilly, when they’d met, she’d treated him like just another man in her infinite circle of friends. Were his letters addressed to a forbidden sweetheart or to a wartime fantasy? He didn’t know. He wanted to harden his heart, to forget her, or at least allow her to fade into the past. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t when he was well and he couldn’t now he was sick. So he wrote his letters to Lottie, dreamed of Tom, and slept the light and muddled sleep of the fevered.

  80

  The veranda had once been green, but time and sunshine had picked the paint almost bare. A rusting screen door was shut tight against the flies, only there were holes in the mesh as big as grapefruit. A line of ants wandered through the gap in the bottom of the door like it had been built for them.

  Tom rapped at the frame. ‘Mrs Hershey? Hello?’

  No answer, but maybe a movement from within.

  Tom unhooked the door and opened it. He stood in the doorway, and called again. ‘Hello? Mrs Hershey.’

  There was another movement. As Tom’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw a big white shape on a broken-down couch in the centre of the room. The shape looked like a laundry basket loaded with dirty wash. The laundry basket belched, then groaned.

  ‘Mrs Hershey, my name is Tom Calloway. May I come in?’

  Tom’s senses adjusted to the musty gloom. There was a smell of alcohol and puke. Violet Hershey sat upright, rubbing her soft fat neck. Her skin was grey and unwashed. Her hair looked like it had been cut with pliers six months before, then left to grow into a mat.

  ‘No, sir, I ain’t got nothing. There ain’t nothing here to steal. Ain’t no use poking round in this house.’

  ‘Ma’am, I understand you own some land hereabouts. I was wondering if you’d be interested in making some good money out of it.’

  ‘I ain’t got no land. I ain’t got nothing to steal. I ain’t –’ The moan turned off abruptly, as Hershey slowly adjusted to the shock of being woken up at two in the afternoon. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘My name is Tom Ca –’

  ‘Mister, I don’t give a damn who the hell you are. Ain’t you even going to help an old lady up?’

  Tom went over to offer her an arm. She didn’t want an arm, she wanted a whole body lift. The smell of alcohol and puke grew sickeningly intense. Tom hauled her to her feet. Hershey dragged herself to the bathroom where she sat on the can with the door open. When she came out, she looked a little more awake, a little more alive.

  ‘You going to fix me a drink or do I have to get my own?’

  Tom looked around. The kitchen was more squalid than he fancied going into. The gloomy parlour was crowded with old bits of furniture, none of it worth a cent more than firewood, but nothing obviously like a drinks cupboard. Dust and sand from the beach had blown in through the gaping door and windows, and now covered everything. The floor crunched as Tom walked. Then he saw it: a clear glass one-gallon container of the kind that drugstores sometimes used to dispense root beer. Tom pulled out the stopper and smelled. It was pure grain alcohol.

  ‘Prohibition Bourbon, that’s what I call it,’ cried Hershey. ‘Prohibition Bourbon.’

  Tom found a filthy glass on the floor, shook a couple of ants out of it, and filled it half full of liquor. He brought it over. Hershey wouldn’t reach out her hand to take it. ‘My arm,’ she whined. ‘Aches like a hooker’s puss.’ He bent lower, then lower still. ‘Ha!’ cried Hershey in triumph, as she snapped upwards to plant a fleshy kiss right on Tom’s lips. ‘Ha! Men! Only after one thing.’ She swallowed her drink like it was ginger beer and held the glass out for more. Tom refilled it, but planted the glass on a table where she’d have to reach for it.

  ‘Mrs Hershey, I’m an oilman interested in drilling for oil on your land. If you agree, then I’ll pay you forty bucks an acre every year, starting from today. If I hit oil, you’ll get a fifteen per cent share in the royalties.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had promises before. I’ve had offers. But when it comes to –’

  ‘But first of all, I need to verify that the acres in question belong to you. It’s not that I doubt –’

  ‘Oh, go on, take advantage. My late husband of bloody memory, bleeding mem – … Oh, dang it all to hell-an’-horseshit, I mean blessed memory – he looked after them things. He was a good man, mister, no matter what you say. But now I’m on my own, defenceless, I don’t care to keep account of all them technilegalations. I got my mem’ries and nobody can take them aways.’

  As she babbled, she groped beneath her couch and brought out wads of paper. She threw them at Tom, but her throw was feeble and the papers just tumbled over the floor. Tom collected them up, taking care to avoid too much contact with her filthy skirts or the grit-grimy floor. The papers were mostly trash. Laundry tickets, shopping lists, unopened letters, invoices, some papers relating to the hire-purchase of a Model T Ford and other papers connected to its subsequent repossession. There was also a valid land purchase order, declaring the twenty-seven acres on Signal Hill to be the legal property of Mr Josiah Brand Hershey. The date was 1899. It figured. The land in question was farmed by a pair of elderly Japanese, raising cucumbers, melons and an acre or two of scraggy avocados. Only thing was, Japanese weren’t allowed to own land under California law, so most of the farmers hereabouts leased their land from white landowners. The rental income from the land was probably all that kept Hershey afloat.

  ‘This’ll do,’ said Tom, waving the document. ‘Strictly speaking, I ought to take this down to th
e county courthouse and have the county clerk verify this on his books, but this is a deal between friends, right? There’s got to be trust.’ His tone was warm and friendly.

  ‘You didn’t ought to call him bad names, mister. He had his bad points, I’ll grant you, but he was a good man and you didn’t ought to have said all them things.’

  ‘No bad names, ma’am, only a deal between friends.’

  Tom let himself act magnanimous, but in truth he was only protecting his interests. The county courthouse was alive with leasehounds and promoters. If he went to court to verify the lease, then by the time he got back to sign the deal with Hershey, there’d be two dozen other people trying to sweet-talk her into selling drilling rights. Tom smiled a broad trust-me smile. He thumped a stack of dollars on the filthy table. ‘Ma’am, if we cut a deal here today, then these dollar bills are going to stay behind with you.’

  ‘I want to count ’em.’

  Tom knew that if he handed her the dollars they’d disappear in a flash into her dirty bosom. ‘First we deal.’

  ‘I only want to feel ’em. I’m only an old –’

  ‘Ma’am, you can take them to bed and chew on them, only first we have to strike a deal.’

  ‘Eighty dollars.’

  ‘Eighty dollars an acre? That’s way too much. I can go to fifty.’

  ‘And I know all about Shell Oil, don’t think I don’t. I know there are people who’d take advantage of an innocent old woman. I know –’

  ‘Mrs Hershey, Shell Oil is drilling an exploration well. It’s called that way because no one knows what they’re going to find. If you –’

  ‘There are folks up on the hill who are millionaires, just from selling one little patch o’ dirt. Mill-ee-on-aires. And you offer me a ratty little sixty dollars an acre.’ Hershey started to cry, big round tears plopping from her cheeks.